George Eliot | George Eliot

At a glance:

Author: Rosemary Ashton
First Published: 1996
Type of Work: Literary biography
Time of Work: 1819-1880
Setting: Warwickshire, Coventry, and London, England; Geneva, Switzerland; Germany; and Italy
Principal Characters: Marian Evans, Robert Evans, Isaac Evans, Charles Bray, Cara Bray, Sara Hennell, John Chapman, Herbert Spencer, George H. Lewes, John Blackwood, John Cross
Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
Subjects: Authors or writers, Nineteenth century, Marriage, Religion, Alienation, England or English people, Women’s issues, Women, Puritans or Puritanism, Victorian era or Victorianism
Locales: London, England, Germany, Italy, Geneva, Switzerland, Warwickshire, England, Coventry, England

It was relatively late in life—at age thirty- seven—that Marian Evans published, anonymously, her first fiction, thus commencing the novelistic career which made hers, under the pseudonym George Eliot, one of the preeminent voices of the Victorian era. For Rosemary Ashton, indeed, Eliot “was the greatest woman of the century,” for the extraordinary reach of her intellectual and personal knowledge and understanding, for the daring steps of her young womanhood, and for the novels in which, Ashton argues, more than any other single writer, she “capture[d] sympathetically the...

George Eliot | George Eliot

At a glance:

Join eNotes